


The Labyrinth Made Of One Straight Line

by gogollescent



Category: Gunnerkrigg Court
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-07
Updated: 2013-09-07
Packaged: 2017-12-25 21:06:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/957611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Jones,” says Surma’s voice, on the other end of the line. “What’s happening?”</p><p>"I don’t understand that question," Jones says, factually.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Labyrinth Made Of One Straight Line

Surma is technically the Court’s medium even after she relocates to Good Hope. This is a consequence not of any tradition governing her term of office, but rather of mixed exigency; no other alumnus has the qualifications for the position, and the denizens of Gillitie Wood are at once quieter and more disquieting than ever in Jones’ memory. The forest has in some regards closed itself, a cool answer to Renard’s imprisonment: the Court was well within its rights, to be sure, but Coyote has prerogatives all his own, and moods that tint the sky above the trees. The air tastes, permanently, of rot—or so James tells her, rolling his tongue around in his cheek like a sweet. What he sucks, she assumes, is a pellet of void, a space filled with nothing so much as godly petulance.

Still, she does not expect the phone call. “Jones,” says Surma’s voice, on the other end of the line. “What’s happening?”

"I don’t understand that question," Jones says, factually. Surma sounds bereft. Among the emotional registers Jones is capable of identifying from sound alone, bereavement ranks highly; she either follows disaster or is incapable of avoiding it, as a woman said of her once, with her dead son in her arms. The woman’s father said, She gives it birth.

“ _The Court_ ,” Surma says. “You frozen bloody—”

The call cuts out.

Later, there's a sequel, with a more coherent author. “… _dreamed_  the forest was burning. Woke up, called ya. I don’t know what was in me. But Jones, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you, if I was needed.” This is a plea. Jones says, “Yes,” without hesitation. She would, of course: but she can conceive of almost no circumstances in which the Court might require Surma’s services. Even the tests are done with, performed in large part by Surma’s husband, who was willing, for several years, to pretend a serial autopsy was treatment. Surma is remarkable for nothing so much as the persistence of her ashes—though of all the gaps in Jones’ understanding, the holes she regards with specific bafflement, as a being without an interior, without secret chambers or sinuses or caverns full of ribs, whose solidity is out of joint with creviced consciousness—how is it, she asks herself, that a stone can perceive, not the unabridged cosmos or dense oblivion, but an erratic pattern of light? …Of all ignorances, recently she has been preoccupied with that defunct metaphor, the smothered flame.

Or: the etheric mechanism that is killing Surma is most commonly described as inheritance. But fire is not an element or a wealth to be willed. Who has ever diminished fire by using it to ignite a second blaze? Fire is a process, a contagion; fire repeats itself. Suppose Surma’s elemental forebear was a water spirit, then you could see it: how sterile molecules, sculpted by ether, would be enough to love, but not to live—would not support a river and a stream. But that conceptual ancestor had burned. The first time Jones saw a man, or something like a man, start a fire, she thought it was a mistake, like an act of self-injury. It in some ways resembled the gust of blood from an arterial wound. She had re-evaluated her assessment  _because_ it multiplied. She remembers, too, the first time someone handed her a chunk of smoking meat, and she gave it back to them, covering her mouth with her hands because in those days, when she copied the sounds the hunters made, it sounded like the scraping of dry boulders. She did not really understand speech anyway. It took her twenty thousand years of observation to suspect humans of grammar, to extract the least significance from a word as distinct from a flame.

Later, they put her on pyres, and set tapers to the straw at her feet. If fire is a finite article, then it must pursue her and her alone, like so many have said disaster does. The truth, of course, is that disaster breeds, and fire multiplies, and they carpet the earth. She fails to avoid them because she likewise has no end. In time, if not in space… she offers, doubtfully, to go to Good Hope in person, and assuage Surma’s concerns.

Surma laughs. “Why not?” she says, dislike clear in her tone, and gratitude as well. Mostly gratitude. There is still, in Jones’ mind, an image of Surma as she was when they met, thirteen years old and accompanying her friends to a movie that James had invited Jones to watch with them. Heavy insight had risen in the light blue eyes, under makeup-encrusted lids, as Surma looked from Jones to James’ uncomplicated smile: to Jones again.

“Why the hell not. Come and assuage me, Jones. I’ll introduce you to Antimony.”

 _—her to Antimony._  As though Antimony, after all, is the axis of knowledge. The heart where it’s delivered, by each adjacent vein.

But when Jones arrives the child is asleep, and Surma doesn’t wake her. “I see you brought me a stick,” she says, nodding to the branch in Jones’ hand. “Should I ask?”

Surma seems alert, lucid. Jones wonders how much is due to her daughter’s unconsciousness. Her hand in Antimony’s hair looks like a scaffolding of bone raised over coals.

"This was found on the bridge. It is the closest the forest has come to a communication since—"

"Gotcha." Surma takes the branch. "Was it a windy day when you found this? Because I don't—"

She stops. There was pathetic relief in her face when Jones stepped into the room, and amusement at the offering, and a trace of anger. Now those things are gone.

Jones finds Surma’s attraction for the people around her to be consistent with everything Jones remembers. Instability and insecurity, paired with a certain urgent, nameless thirst, always comprise a gravitational well in the human temperament: space begging occupance. Surma is undefended and hollow, and therefore welcoming. At times like these, however, focused on the work that she was bred for, Surma looks… unlovable, cold and afraid, surrounded by conviction. It's the look she bore when Reynardine killed her friend. Surma, in truth, never had to be taught. Not about vision, or falseness, or love. If she resented Jones, it was perhaps because she could see how James had changed as a consequence of Jones’ presence; or because Jones, herself, learned everything, through dull millennia. Because Jones is no more fit to think than the least of animals, the most mindless of elementals, except in that she lasts. She loses nothing. Any structure, no matter how calcified, how lifeless, how thickened by death and not by birth, connotes a brain if it is intricate. The accident of sapience arises out of individual longevity just as it did out of the species’—even if imagination, that precise, astonishing organ of an intellect which can benefit itself, proves and continues unattainable. Would that console Surma? Yes, Jones may accumulate patterns, secrets, names; but she will never have a mind that needs as much as it knows.

Surma says: “It’s the general.”

"Ysengrin?"

"He’s forgotten something," she says, frowning. "Or it’s been taken from him. A gap…" She smooths her palm along the grain of the branch. "Jones, have you  _seen_ Ysengrin? Since the dust-up?”

"No," Jones admits. Surma offers her the wood again, and Jones accepts, although it is to her eye unchanged. "This was left by Ysengrin?"

"This  _was_  Ysengrin,” Surma said. “Somehow. Don’t go asking—don’t ask me what that means, either. Maybe he needs to wash his coat or things take root.” She is trembling, minutely, her tangled hair an unstable, mountainous mass; her taut hands blur. She wears makeup even here, albeit inexactly applied, with smudges of lipstick past the boundary of her mouth, and lavender streaks extending from the corners of each eye. Her frown is a green note in the paleness of her skin, like a new leaf; and Jones reminds herself that she is human, almost human, and if analogies contained her it would be stranger than if not—that she should be forgiven, when she dies.


End file.
